Why You Need to Sell in Amazon’s European Marketplaces

I make a lot of confessions on this blog that I probably haven’t said to anyone in person. Here’s another for you: it took me MONTHS to realise how easy it is to sell on all the European Amazon marketplaces. I heard about all the awkwardness about moving stock from one country to the next, about VAT requirements and about the added responsibilities and just shied away from it. For months. Now 20% of all of my Amazon online arbitrage sales come from German, Italy, France and Spain. Why didn’t I start earlier?

There are two steps involved in allowing your Amazon FBA stock to go from being UK-exclusive, to being available to millions more people. All you need to do is to click that you want to enable the option, and then you state how much you want to alter the price shown to those markets. It’s really as simple as that. You barely have to put any thought into it. Depending on the categories you sell in and your selling restrictions, you should be able to sell on the vast majority of your inventory to a far wider range of people.

These are the three main reasons you need to get selling across Europe:

1. More Eyes = More Opportunities to Sell

The first reason is the most obvious; having your products available to more people means you have more potential to make sales. I can’t see a single reason why you wouldn’t choose to do this. A lot of the things we sell in the UK is just as popular across Europe. There are no extra costs in having your products listed elsewhere, so just do it.

When I enabled mine, there was an immediate uplift in sales, with some of the cheaper, non-selling products in my inventory suddenly flying out, and where I couldn’t get the UK Buy Box before, I could make up for it by claiming it in another market instead, collecting the sales with it.

2. European Arbitrage

In many cases, UK products are more scarce on the rest of the continent. When the demand is much greater than the supply, you can increase prices to increase your profits. If you have goods that are sought-after in Europe and in plentiful supply here, you better make sure that you’re bridging that gap and taking advantage while you can.

Think about ex-pats that can’t get their hands on their favourite foods from their new home in Spain now. Think of all the video game collectors that want that final addition. Help fill the gaps. Remember you can even do this by buying stock from Amazon UK to sell on another Amazon marketplace.

3. Fresh Opportunities

When you’ve been doing online arbitrage for a while, the product research side can feel quite tedious. Once you know what you’re selling and you know where to get a decent supply of it, that graft feels like more effort than it’s worth. Knowing that you’ve got four whole new markets to explore should give you some much-needed inspiration to go out and look for different things to sell, even if you’re just looking to sell internationally.

Once those French, Italian, Spanish and Germany disbursals start rolling through, you’re going to have a newfound reason to want to keep those revenue figures climbing up.